


Pilot's Tour

by quigonejinn



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-29
Updated: 2013-07-29
Packaged: 2017-12-21 18:18:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 810
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/903367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quigonejinn/pseuds/quigonejinn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How many people live full-time at the Anchorage Shatterdome? <i>You picked up a habit of studying in the maintenance bay during off-hours. </i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Pilot's Tour

**Author's Note:**

> So I mean, like, Yancy Becket dies in the course of this. We all saw the movie, right?

When you are sixteen, you meet Yancy Becket. How many people were there at the Anchorage Shatterdome those days? 4,000 active duty? 6,000 including contractors? Most of them lived off-base, and it was a limited population living and eating and sleeping within the gates. The Beckets were piloting Gipsy Danger, and your _sensei_ was their commanding officer. You picked up a habit of studying in the maintenance bay during off-hours. There were months between kaiju attacks, at the time, and after the evening shift, the place was clear. You felt a little guilty about slipping off to do it, but _sensei_ hadn’t specifically forbidden it, had it? He knew you studied alone, on your own. He said you weren’t supposed to bother Tendo, and you didn’t: you never even saw him during your studying sessions.

You weren’t bothering anyone. You weren’t doing anything inappropriate. It was a lot more comfortable than being in the library, with your classmates. 

Belatedly, you found out that when Yancy Becket had trouble sleeping, he went down to the maintenance bays to exercise: one night, he must have heard you, because he swung up an access ladder and found you tucked in the second-level D4 maintenance alcove, math homework spread over your knees. 

He looked at you.

You looked back at him, blinking.

"You want a pilot’s tour?" he said. "I’ve seen you everywhere else, but I haven’t seen you in the Conn-Pod. It’s the staff ID input, right?"

You flush, because he’s right. You know _sensei’s_ , of course, because you have to give it to buy things at the commissary. You’ve also seen Tendo type his own roughly seventeen thousand times, but he does it to print out journal articles about Jaeger research that you can’t get through the subscription available through the classrooms — he thinks it’s funny when you ask him questions that he can’t answer right away and has to go talk to systems engineers about and pretend that, oh, he just happened to have a question about the implications of an article in the most recent issue of _International Journal of Applied Kaiju Morphology_.

For the record, you weren’t even going to think about typing in _sensei’s_.

…

So Yancy Becket is kind to you, and he shows you around the Conn-POD, pointing out the interface plates and asking if you want to step up into the magnetic lock platform. Without the full suit, without an activated Pons drive, he reassures you, nothing will happen. You hold onto your backpack and shake your head: he looks at you for a second, then lets the subject drop. In gratitude, after the tour is over, you make sure to keep out of his way. 

You stick to high up, the catwalks by Gipsy Danger’s chest or shoulders, where he never runs. You are sure that he thinks you’ve been warned off because once, you see him bring a woman into the maintenance bay. They are laughing. Maybe a little drunk. You pack up your homework and slip into one of the access tunnels. You put your headphones in tight, and the next day, when one of the girls at your homeroom table is bragging about how Yancy flirted with her in the hallway — you duck your head and smile a little yourself. You know that he didn’t go home with a high school sophomore. 

Other times, you see him bring Jaeger pilot work — revised schematics, new configurations of mechanics. He puzzles over them; book-studying doesn’t come easily to him, and he has to read sections to himself out loud, muttering about how he is going to have to get Choi to go over it again with him tomorrow. He skips rope between hard sections to wake himself up. 

All in all, Yancy Becket is kind to you, even though he doesn’t have a reason to be. You suspect he knows you’re his commander’s adopted daughter, and that he knows you’re not supposed to be in the maintenance bay, dreaming about being a pilot. He might even have an idea why _sensei_ doesn’t even want you thinking about it: still, he doesn’t tell anybody, so you thank Yancy the only way you can. You stay out of his way and let him have his privacy on a base where there is very little of it, in a time when the most important part of his job is sharing his mind with someone else. 

You think of him fondly, but still: when pieces of his body wash up a week later ten miles north of Sitka, you go to the maintenance bay. The ruins of Gipsy Danger are below, and nobody is working on them because it isn’t clear whether there is anything more than salvage value.

Yancy Becket was kind to you, and when he dies, you surprise yourself, Mako Mori. You cry.


End file.
